How Far She Went

As the first story following the title piece, “Doing This, Saying That, to Applause” marks the shift from accepting the pretense of a life well-lived to acting out in ways that sabotage all things deserving of applause. The protagonist takes control of his own desperation by committing suicide. Both his life and his death represent loss—but loss that is self-inflicted as his only consolation. Instead of further querying how he got to this point and perhaps walking back his stance to find some resolution as earlier characters did, and instead of resigning himself to his new life (as the granny did in the title story) of fugitive and then prisoner, the male character rejects everything by killing himself though he shows agency in the end by taking his own life, suicide is also considered by society as “running away” from the issues at hand, or an extreme refusal to address the issues at hand.